Ex-Deputy Minister of Culture Olga Yarilova will be tried by the opposition’s thunderstorm

The case of a former official, who is suspected of fraud involving 200 million rubles, came to Olga Zatomskaya

The case of ex-Minister of Culture Olga Yarilova, who has already spent six months in a pre-trial detention center, has been transferred to the Tverskoy District Court. This is reported on the authority’s website. The story of fraud with the Pushkin Card received a serious resonance when, during his report, the director of the Federal Service for Financial Monitoring, Yuri Chikhanchin, told President Vladimir Putin that his agency, together with the FSB, had identified a criminal group that had laundered millions of rubles on a state project. By that time, three suspects had been arrested, and soon Olga Yarilova, who until the fall of last year occupied a prominent position in the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, was also taken into custody.

The name of Olga Yarilova has previously appeared in a corruption scandal, but in the end she remained in the rank of a witness. Moreover, then, in 2018, she increased her status – she moved from the post of director of the department of tourism and regional policy of the Ministry of Culture to the post of deputy minister of culture. Five years ago, we were talking about fraud with government subsidies that were allocated for the implementation of the Annual Festival of Small Towns in Tobolsk and Kostroma and a series of events dedicated to the 800th anniversary of Alexander Nevsky in Yaroslavl, Veliky Novgorod and Baltiysk. Some of the 14 million rubles actually went to cultural events, but most of it went into pockets. Ex-employee of the Ministry of Culture Anna Nikitsova spoke at the trial and stated that two deputy ministers of culture, Alla Manilova and Olga Yarilova, were directly involved in corruption schemes. Both, however, escaped with a slight fright, and the chief accountant of the Skrezhal association, Irina Khodzhaeva, through whom the money passed, received a sentence (3.5 years in prison). Now we are talking about much more serious amounts; a slight scare is not enough.

Yarilova is currently charged with abuse of official position (Part 3 of Article 285 of the Criminal Code), although initially it was also a case of fraud on an especially large scale (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) for the theft of more than 200 million rubles . with participation in the Pushkin Map project. A group of people (residents of the Moscow Region – Viktor Yakubov, Emil Gurbanov and Ilya Safonov) organized a mass purchase of tickets through the Pushkin Card, but there were no events in fact. That is, they laundered funds according to the Gogol principle of “dead souls.”

Immediately after the arrest of the ex-official, who allegedly resigned from her post last fall of her own free will, it was reported that she admitted her guilt and began to cooperate with the investigation. Now other information has appeared – she does not admit her guilt. In addition, it is reported that the investigation believes that Yarilova unreasonably included the Ice Cream Museum in Moscow in the Pushkin Card program. That is, now we are not talking about the previously announced large-scale frauds, but about more local ones. The situation will become clearer when the court hearings begin, but it is important to understand that Olga Yarilova can pull many other officials along with her, because it is unlikely that she made large-scale decisions single-handedly.

The judge in Yarilova’s case is Olga Zatomskaya, the daughter of businessman Yuri Borovkov, who became famous for transferring almost all the leaders of the “non-system opposition” to a special detention center: Boris Nemtsov, Lev Ponomorev, Alexei Navalny, Ilya Yashin and Sergei Udaltsov. Let’s see how she treats the former official.